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After several years of development, SuperTuxKart 1.5 has been officially released today for this free, open-source, and cross-platform kart racing game, a major update that brings new features and improvements.
Coming three years after SuperTuxKart 1.4, the SuperTuxKart 1.5 release brings a new benchmark mode, new LoD (Level of Detail) settings to reduce “popping”, finer control of the game’s audio levels, new egg hunts on the Black Forest, Gran Paradisio Island, and The Old Mine tracks, and support for spotlights.
SuperTuxKart 1.5 also brings graphical enhancements to the overworld as a good-bye to the 1.x Story Mode, adds significant updates to the Vulkan renderer, offers better display of karts, tracks, and game modes, and implements SSAA and Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows for users with powerful GPUs.
On top of that, this release improves the parachute and bubblegum shield animations, adds support for configuring STK’s maximum FPS within the game’s options, instead of being limited to a maximum of 120 FPS on PCs and 30 FPS for Android, and adds new fonts to allow rendering several new languages.
Among other changes, SuperTuxKart 1.5 introduces new music for the Las Dunas Arena and Las Dunas Soccer arenas, adds color and sound indicators when an elimination is about to happen in Follow-The-Leader, enables smooth scrolling for Irrlicht, and improves the accuracy of the framerate limiter.
Last but not least, SuperTuxKart 1.5 adds some graphical effects for legacy video drivers, improves Cascaded Shadow Mapping, improves the performance of scene node iteration, enables new shadows settings, and improves image quality on low and medium presets with better anisotropic filtering.
You can download SuperTuxKart 1.5 right now for 64-bit or AArch64 (ARM64) GNU/Linux systems from the project’s GitHub page. To run the game, extract the archive and execute the run_game.sh file. Alternatively, you can install SuperTuxKart as a Flatpak app from Flathub.
